As you advance in your career and take on more responsibilities, you will be managing multiple areas simultaneously. The average day of high output professionals such as entrepreneurs, executives and industry leaders, involves jumping from one thematic area to another.
One hour they are dealing with a tricky procurement matter, and the next hour they are attending to a sensitive people situation.
The next moment they need to solve an information technology (IT) system issue, and then immediately attend a meeting about the financial statements. How do they do this? They perform what is called context switching.
Context switching is the act of professionally shifting from one mental thematic area to another in an organised manner.
In this process, you must put your mind in a certain frame and remain there until that task is well attended to, after which you pause and then leave behind that mental framework and consciously put on the next appropriate one.
This is different to multitasking. Context switching involves moving systematically from one frame of mind to another, while multitasking is attempting to do those separate things at the same time. Multitasking is widely regarded as being an inefficient way to deal adequately with complex problems that require your full mental and cognitive attention.
This is because the approach to solving the IT problem cannot be mixed up with the approach to addressing the people-related matter. When we try multitasking without skill, we run the risk of obfuscating these different mindsets. As a high-performing professional, you no longer have the luxury to stay in only one frame of work-mind the entire day, you must be flexible enough to put on the correct technical hat when required and then know when to take it off as the context changes and put on the correct hat once more.
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